Unwrapped

Am excited to be talking this November about our community and what God wants to do with us. II am convinced that God is getting ready to do something big with our lives if we are willing o be real with Him and allow Him to be real with us.
I am very curious though, to hear what your experience has been at Mavuno Downtown. If you are a downtownian, how about you post a comment about what you have felt and thought about your time at MDT? [By the way it does not matter if you visited for a day or you are a MDT damu! kila wiki!]

Turning it right back at you

Isn’t it baffling [sometimes unnerving] how Jesus likes to turn things around. Our thoughts at Mavuno downtown this month have been centered around Matthew 5.
What seems to be coming out is that if we took Jesus seriously then we would have a turn-it-around-right-back-at-you perspective towards some of the issues we face.
For example
Some people saw Jesus as an revolutionary, hard-core, perhaps extremist, leader of his day. They thought he came to undo the old way of doing things and start out a radical new way of thinking about God’s law and religion. Jesus takes this thought and turns it around, right back at them. He says “God’s rules as you know them are here to stay [Matt 5:18], so don’t break them and for heaven’s sake don’t make anyone break them [v.19]… as matter of fact, follow them and aim to do a better job than the experts!” [Pharisees and law instructors – those I like to call Rule-junkies].
Here’s another one.
God’s law says murder is really really bad. You can get judged for it. We like to rank murder as one of the worst sins, right up there [or is it down there] with____ [fill in the blank for yourself] Then Jesus takes that thought turn it right back at us. He says, yes, murder’s bad [AND, ALSO, IN THE SAME WAY] anger which results in rash words spoken to others is just as bad. That kind of anger is an express ticket to hell!! [v.21-22]
Here’s one last one.
Adultery is a no-go area. No sleeping around. As if that is not hard enough, Jesus turns it around in the same Jesus sort of way and says that – when your eyes stray, the resulting thoughts are just as bad as the act of adultery itself.
Here’s what I find really hard to take in – In these sayings Jesus takes what we know and then raises the bar so high that it seems impossible to get there.
Here’s what I find comforting – that somehow in the middle of my being baffled by this turn-it-around-right-back-at-you perspective, Jesus understands and if I ask him, he is willing to walk me through it all. [Hebrews 4:15-16]

What if

Kanjii [one of my favourite artists of all time] recently wrote a song with some friends that in essence raised the question “what if…my life looked different than it does now… In the song he flips through a number different scenarios of what we see and what we sometimes would like to experience as measures of success in our own lives.
That concept triggered some questions of my own about some of the “what if’s” of my faith as a Christian. The biggest of these is What if I took Jesus seriously?
I am still mulling over the implications of the likely answers to this question. Interestingly, the more I turn it over in my head the more I’m convinced that it doesn’t matter whether you are a serious, practicing Christian or you are somewhere before the starting line of your own spiritual journey – the answers to the question will not be the same for everyone but the implications of those [varied] answers are likely to be far reaching.
I am taking Matthew chapter 5 as a starting point for my own reflections, as I share them weekly with our community at Mavunodowntown.com.
I have a feeling we may stumble upon some significant thoughts for everyday people…